At the same time that two professional football players leave the sport in the prime of their careers because their bodies can’t handle the abuse anymore, a woman is planning her grand entrance. U.S. women’s national soccer team star Carli Lloyd — a 140-pound, 38-year-old female — says she is considering allegedly serious offers from various NFL teams. These offers were supposedly prompted by a viral video of Lloyd successfully completing a 55-yard field goal at a Philadelphia Eagles practice. With one good field goal under her belt, she feels ready to jump into a sport where the average player outweighs her by 100 pounds and stands about five inches taller. Despite that significant disadvantage, Lloyd says she “definitely could” compete in the league.
Leftist media have predictably gushed over this news. ThinkProgress proclaimed that a female field goal kicker “would be representing women everywhere who are trying to break through barriers.” The Washington Post hailed Lloyd’s “brawny confidence.” The Guardian excitedly wondered whether the soccer player might finally break the “glass ceiling” that has heretofore prevented women from suiting up on game day. To that point, Lloyd would certainly break something on an NFL field — but it won’t be any ceiling.
Of course, we should stipulate that converting a field goal on a practice field doesn’t make you NFL material any more than a hole-in-one in mini-golf makes you a candidate for the PGA Tour. You have to do it with shoulder pads and a helmet, a game clock winding down, 70,000 fans watching, and — most importantly — 11 absurdly fast and extravagantly muscled defenders rushing toward you at a literal breakneck speed.
Speaking of breaking necks, that would be the most likely fate of the first female NFL player. It seems sadly inevitable that the league will eventually cave to P.C. pressure (as it has a tendency to do) and force some poor team to put a woman on its active roster. In our enlightened area, we just cannot allow professional football to remain the exclusive province of men. But I hope for Lloyd’s sake that — despite her wishes — she is not the lamb sacrificed on this particular altar of wokeness.
Kickers might not absorb as much contact as running backs and linebackers, but they wear pads for a reason. Kickers can get flattened during blocked kicks and while trying to tackle someone who recovers a blocked kick. Kickers can get dog-piled on a fumbled snap. Kickers can get pancaked by hard blocks during kick returns. In all of these cases, the people delivering the abuse are big, strong, nasty men who hit other big, strong, nasty men for a living. All the girl power in the world can’t compensate for the fact that a woman’s body simply isn’t built to withstand these collisions. Men’s bodies are hardly built for it, either, which is why NFL players often end up hobbled and brain-damaged. But they can at least survive it. For a time, anyway. Carli Lloyd cannot.
Am I saying that Lloyd is weaker, slower, and more fragile just because she’s a woman? Yes, that’s precisely what I’m saying. And one full speed encounter with a 275-pound blocker on a kick return would be enough to prove the point convincingly — and maybe fatally. God help the woman who must suffer that fate just to demonstrate the flaws in modern feminist doctrine.